Education and Support for Healthcare Professionals to Prevent Future Pandemics: Report of a Conference Workshop

INTRODUCTION: Pandemic infectious diseases pose a real threat to patients and public health in all countries around the world. Healthcare professionals need education and support to prevent these pandemics. However, the provision of this education is not always straightforward, and the views of healthcare professionals from different sectors and different countries should be continually taken into account when providing new educational resources. The following is the report of a workshop that was held to seek the views of healthcare professionals on e-learning and clinical decision support resources as means of providing education in pandemic infectious diseases. THEMES: There was consensus among delegates that just providing e-learning or clinical decision support on its own is not enough - you need to do more if you are going to drive usage, achieve clinical engagement, and ensure that users put their learning from the e-resources into action for the benefit of their patients. Drivers of these outcomes include the provision of content in the appropriate languages, overcoming technology barriers, linking the resources to CPD programmes or existing curricula, strategic engagement of different types of healthcare professionals, and giving due consideration to sustainability and cost effectiveness. CONCLUDING REMARKS: Providing e-learning and clinical decision support resources will be essential if we are to achieve the goal of preventing infectious disease pandemics. But this will not be achievable unless we listen to the practical problems that different stakeholders have in implementing educational programmes. The purpose of this paper is to share these challenges and potential solutions with the wider infectious diseases and global health communities.